What is Revealed Not Taught

For most of my life, I haven’t been asking if things are connected, but where they are connected.

Where does experience meet theory? Where do different traditions quietly converge on the same truth, using different languages to say the same thing?

How is it possible that my father and my husband’s uncle ran the Dharmadhatu together in New York City in 1984, and decades later we met at a café in Los Angeles?
That when I think of someone, they call?

It’s hard to say what came first for me—direct experience of interdependence, or being shaped by Buddhism itself. I was raised by parents who encountered the Dharma through philosophy and teaching. Their entry point was conceptual. Mine was relational.

As a first-generation Buddhist in the West, I learned the Dharma through people first. I watched relationships closely. I noticed attunement and rupture, care and confusion, presence and absence. I learned Buddhism not through doctrine, but through how it lived—or failed to live—between people.

It took me until my early twenties to discover my own direct relationship with Dharma, to find refuge for myself. That timing mattered. Refuge didn’t arrive through belief; it arrived through recognition. My experience had to catch up to form. That arc shaped not only my spiritual path, but the foundation of how I became a therapist.

Today, as a practicing Buddhist and relational clinician, I keep encountering the same fundamental truth across disciplines—psychology, neuroscience, systems theory, contemplative practice. Different frameworks. Same orientation.

Humanistic and relational models of therapy—Carl Rogers and most postmodern approaches—rest on a radical premise: the client is the expert on their own life. The therapist does not fix, diagnose, or construct something new, but walks alongside, follows the client’s wisdom, and trusts the organism’s innate movement toward wholeness.

This is not just a therapeutic stance.
It is a Buddhist one.

Buddhism begins with the understanding that our fundamental nature is already good—imbued with wisdom and compassion. Suffering is not evidence of deficiency, but of obscuration. The work is not construction; it is uncovering. Not adding, but distilling. Not becoming something new, but remembering what has always been here.

This is how I understand my work as a therapist.

Internal Family Systems (IFS) points to this ancient truth with modern language. IFS speaks of Self energy—a quality of awareness that is calm, curious, compassionate, and connected. It is not something we manufacture; it is something we access. When parts soften, Self naturally emerges.

What’s striking is how explicitly relational this process is. In IFS, the therapist is a vehicle. The more congruent I am, the more connected I am to my own Self energy—or what Buddhism would call fundamental nature, or awake awareness—the more easily the client can access theirs. Healing happens not because I do something, but because I am being with them.

This mirrors the oral tradition of Buddhism—pointing-out instructions—where a teacher doesn’t give wisdom, but helps a student recognize their own nature. What is transmitted, is something being revealed.

Interpersonal neurobiology offers yet another lens. Dan Siegel describes the mind as an emergent, relational process—greater than the sum of its parts. Regulation, integration, and healing arise in relationship. This is dependent origination, or arising, but with brain scans.

Across models, the therapist’s presence matters more than technique. Presence is not passive. It is an active attunement—a disciplined openness, a willingness to remain in beginner’s mind, rooted in the present moment.

And this truth doesn’t stop with humans.

Nature has always known what we are still trying to remember. Zack Bush speaks about how birdsong evolves alongside specific species of trees—how the frequency of the song actually helps open the pores of leaves so trees can exchange oxygen more efficiently. Forests breathe better because birds sing. Trees and birds are shaping one another, constantly, in relationship.

Beneath the forest floor, mycelial networks pass nutrients, information, and warning signals between trees—elders supporting saplings, the sick receiving resources from the well. Nothing survives alone. Interdependence isn’t a metaphor. It’s a biological fact.

And yet, here we are—organizing our culture around radical individualism. Teaching people to self-optimize, self-regulate, self-actualize in isolation. Asking nervous systems designed for connection to heal alone.

If nothing else, perhaps this secular psychological priesthood—therapy rooms, somatic practices, relational models—can serve as a reminder of what we already know but keep forgetting: healing happens between us.

Increasingly, leaders in the field are naming what has always been implicit. Dick Schwartz speaks openly about the spiritual nature of IFS. Peter Levine has said the same about somatic work. Psychology, especially in its popular forms, has become a primary meaning-making system in our culture—a place people go to ask the oldest human questions.

This isn’t a problem.
It’s an invitation.

We are spiritual beings, whether or not we use that language. Call it God, nature, awareness, Buddha nature, aliveness. When we turn toward our emotions, our bodies, our inner lives with care—something opens. When we can allow ourselves to feel rather than bypass or analyze, we touch the simple truth of being alive.

David Whyte writes, everything we’re seeking is already standing at the doorway—waiting for our attention. That the world doesn’t withhold itself from us; we withhold ourselves from the world.

Yes, there are so many ways in which the world is broken. Life feels somehow harder than ever. Suffering is thick and murky— systemic and personal.

Buddhism has never denied that.

And yet—in the space of relationship, in moments of presence, in the simple act of turning toward experience with care—something remembers itself.

I’m still looking—not to prove that things are connected, but to stay close to the living places where that connection reveals itself. More often than not, those places are within and between us.

And more often than not, they might feel like home.